A Cunning Opposition Turns Tables in Mongolia

By JAMES BROOKE

Published: July 8, 2004

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia, July 7—
Voters in this literate, sparsely populated country between China and Russia have handed their governing party of former Communists an uncommon lesson that indicates that a young democracy may have come of age.

In a boisterous election 10 days ago that pitted guile against might, the country's 1.5 million voters cut the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party numbers in the 76-seat Parliament from 72 to 36. On Wednesday, the General Election Commission confirmed that the opposition, the Motherland Democratic Coalition, known as the Democrats, won 34 seats. The Democrats claim to have won two more seats, and have taken their argument to an administrative court. They are also wooing three independents in the hope of forming a government.

Although the court has three more weeks to govern, it is expected to announce its decision on the two contested seats by Friday, before most Mongolians disconnect from politics for Naadam, a four-day midsummer festival of horse races, archery contests and wrestling matches.

Now, with both sides claiming victory and the governing party fighting for the allegiance of the three independents as well, Mongolians are drawing up their chairs for a summer of political horse trading to see who will govern this grassy nation of nomads on China's northern border, which became a democracy only 14 years ago. Already they have experienced a political spectacle in which the governing party's advantages in money and power were neutralized by a tactical maneuver that American political operatives could only dream of.

Next Thursday, President Bush is expected to hail Mongolia's multiparty democracy when he receives President Natsagiyn Bagabandi in Washington.

Meanwhile, China is viewing the development somewhat differently. Newspapers, magazines and television are largely keeping silent about the election carried out on June 27 by their less affluent neighbors. Although Western reporters have journeyed here to cover this revolution through the ballot box, editors in China have stayed away, as they commonly do when the news is not to the liking of the country's leaders.

In Mongolia, with 2.5 million people, multiparty democracy has become so entrenched that its novelty days are over. In a survey of Mongolian adults conducted last month by the Sant Maral Foundation, an independent polling group, 90 percent of the 2,170 respondents described Mongolia's move in 1990 from a one-party Communist state to a multiparty democracy as a ''right step.'' A Soviet satellite for most of the 20th century, the country underwent a peaceful democratic revolution in the spring of 1990 and held its first multiparty elections that July.

The People's Revolutionary Party was staunchly Communist for 69 years after its founding in 1921, but has moved to the center in the last decade, becoming a social democratic party that courts foreign investment and close ties with the United States. Except for a four-year Democratic Coalition interlude, marked by a series of prime ministers, it has governed the country for most of its 83 years.

The Democratic Coalition is a loose alliance of three parties that advocates more civil liberties, but roughly similar free-market economic policies. Unemployment, corruption and child care were the major issues in the race.

Although the People's Revolutionary Party has governed Mongolia since 2000, it claims to be the victim of opposition fraud.

''There was massive election fraud,'' Y. Otgonbayar, secretary of the People's Revolutionary Party, said Tuesday, looking grayer and tenser than he did in an interview five weeks ago. He said the opposition stole seats.

In the foyer of the party headquarters on Tuesday, about a dozen people, largely elderly, inspected a hastily mounted ''Museum of Election Fraud.''

On display were gifts said to be handed out as bribes by opposition candidates: white porcelain soup bowls painted with the image of Genghis Khan, Mongolia's national hero; colorful silk Buddhist prayer scarves; packs of playing cards marked with names of Democratic candidates; a half-empty vodka bottle labeled ''Strong Stuff from the Strong Party''; and wall clocks, their battery-powered second hands sweeping relentlessly around equally relentlessly smiling faces of opposition candidates.

Despite this display of ''fraud,'' the evidence seems to tilt strongly in the opposite direction -- that it was the governing party that most heavily abused the rules.

Mongolians for Open Society, a group financed by the American billionaire George Soros, found that the ruling party used government halls without paying 31 times, compared with 3 times by the opposition. The survey found 384 cases of government cars used by the ruling party in campaign work, compared with 3 cases by the opposition. It also determined that state employees spent 2,873 days when they were supposed to be toiling for the government campaigning for the governing party instead, compared with 111 days for the opposition.

All this came on top of an advertising blitz by the governing party, which outspent the opposition by 10 to 1 for television, radio and newspaper advertisements.